Going Vegan, or How I Ran All Out Of Excuses

Posted by Jesper on January 3, 2026

It’s been clear to me for a while now that our diet can have a big impact on climate change. Up until 2019, I consequently called myself a “flexitarian” and tried to avoid eating meat as long as doing so was not too inconvenient to myself or the people around me. That was until the 2019 EUTypes Summer School on Types for Programming and Verification in Ohrid (Macedonia), where the vegetarian options were truly appalling. Here I was in great admiration of the small number of brave and persistent vegetarians who bravely endured and kept improvising to find something edible. I realized that I could have a similar influence on other people, and this inspired me to take the next step and declare myself a vegetarian and stop eating meat and fish altogether.

In the years since then, I’ve been slowly gathering more reasons to avoid animal products and I’ve been slowly reducing the amount of them in my diet as a consequence. In particular, my brother and his wife were already fully vegan and they introduced me to new exciting flavors such as seitan and cashew cheese. I replaced my cow milk with oat or soy milk and stopped buying eggs. I also started to discover the joy of cooking dishes with tofu, beans, lentils, tempeh, seitan, jackfruit, and many other ingredients I’d never used before. However, even as I was trying to go fully vegan I noticed myself making many different excuses all the time:

Writing down these excuses and doing some research, I found that on reflection none of them really held up. Either they did not provide sufficient justification, or they were just flat-out wrong. So after dragging my feet for way too long, I would like to take the start of 2026 as the opportunity to finally commit 100% to being vegan.

10 reasons for going vegan

One question that I get quite regularly and that might also be on your mind right now is: “why?” Why do I think it is so important to be vegan? It’s always a challenge to answer that question, not because I don’t have a reason but because I have too many. So let me give you my top 10 reasons for going vegan:

  1. Animal farming is one of the biggest contributors to global warming.
  2. It is also the main cause of deforestation and environmental collapse.
  3. It is also the main cause of habitat loss and species extinction.
  4. It is also the highest risk factor for the emergence of new pandemics such as Covid-19.
  5. It also causes immense amounts of pain and suffering to billions of animals on a daily basis.
  6. It also robs farmed animals of the right to live their lives in freedom and free from abuse and exploitation that they have as sentient beings.
  7. Factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses are horrible places that not only exploit animals but the humans working in them and living around them too.
  8. Plant-based products are more healthy than animal products.
  9. It is easier to cook vegan food, as there is much lower risk of food poisoning.
  10. There are tons of very tasty plant-based foods that I would probably never have tried otherwise.

I am not providing sources here, but many of the links at the bottom of this post do provide them. I am always happy to look them up for you on request.

To be honest, the real question should be ‘why are you not yet vegan?’ I understand that I’m speaking from a position of privilege and for some people there will be very good reasons why they can’t. Yet does that apply to you, the individual reading this? And if not, what are the objections or obstacles stopping you from going vegan? If you do some research on these, do they actually hold up or are they just excuses you tell to yourself?

At this point in writing this post, I do realize that I’m probably coming across as being terribly preachy and entitled, which I don’t particularly want. Yet at the same time, I genuinely think not transitioning to a more plant-based food system is one of the biggest mistakes that our current society is making (and yes, I do realize that’s saying a lot). Yet it’s rare for me to hear a honest and solid argument for why we are not correcting this mistake. While I don’t think this is the case, it’s possible that I’m living in a bubble and I’m wrong about all of this, so if you have some genuinely good counterarguments I would be really interested to hear them.

A few common objections and responses

To help with addressing many of the arguments that non-vegans have raised, I can highly recommend Ed Winter’s book How to Argue With a Meat Eater (and Win Every Time) that I finished reading recently. It starts with a chapter on how to communicate effectively by showing genuine curiosity and compassion, but the main bulk of the book is made up of a long list of all the different arguments that people use to argue against veganism, and a detailed and well-researched rebuttal of each of them. Despite the title, I believe it is also a very useful book for non-vegans who would like to challenge their beliefs. Below, I picked a few quotes here that I found most relevant or interesting, but the book has many, many more arguments and responses.

“Animal products taste good.”

Our sensory pleasure is not more important than the lives and experiences of the animals who are killed to satisfy our tastebuds.

“There are bad apples but animal farming isn’t like what we see in the exposés.”

Animal farming is not a case of a few bad apples acting cruelly - mistreatment and abuse is systemic.
Content warning: graphic descriptions of animal abuse

Male animals are coerced into ejaculating. Female animals are penetrated and forcibly impregnated. Newborn animals are mutilated, castrated and then taken away from their mothers. Animals are kept in cages, concrete pens and ammonia-riddled barns. They’re selectively bred to make them grow larger, to produce more milk and eggs, or to have more babies, all of which negatively impacts their bodies and wellbeing. They’re shot, have their necks snapped, and are slammed against floors and walls for being too weak or for not growing fast enough. They’re crammed into small boxes or forced into trucks that take them to facilities that exist with the sole purpose of killing them. They’re herded onto kill floors, into metal boxes or into gondolas in gas chambers. They have bolts fired into their skulls, electricity forced into their brains or carbon dioxide pumped into their lungs. And all so that we can then pull a blade across their throats, drain them of the blood in their bodies and cut them open, pull out all of their organs, cut off their heads, slice up the parts we want to wrap in plastic before then rendering down everything else that’s left.

This isn’t just factory farming. Remove the cages and concrete pens, and animals raised outdoors still face these horrors as well. They still have their tails docked and rubber bands wrapped around their testicles. They’re still ear-tagged, still selectively bred, still impregnated. Does an outdoor pig farmer spend money and time on a sick and ill pig who won’t make them any money, or do they kill them on the farm just like the pig farmers who use farrowing crates? Factory farming might be worse, but just because some animals get to feel the sunshine doesn’t make everything else that we do to them moral as a consequence.

“Veganism is too extreme.”

Should it not be viewed as extreme to inflict suffering on someone else, particularly when you can avoid doing so? Is it not extreme to fund places that exist for the sole purpose of slaughtering feeling, conscious beings? Are gas chambers not extreme? Isn’t causing animals to scream out in pain or to shake in terror an extreme thing to do?

“We can compromise and just reduce the amount of animal products we eat.”

Just because humans will always have some impact doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t aim to minimise that impact as far as possible. While reduction is great news for the animals who will be spared, for those who are still being exploited it means nothing.

“Veganism is classist and privileged”

Of course, being in a position where you have different food options to pick from is a privilege. But none of that invalidates the merits of veganism. Research has shown that a whole-foods plant-based diet in high-income nations can actually cut a third off your food budget.

In areas where there is a genuine lack of plant-foods, meaning that someone can’t be vegan, that is a failure on a societal and food policy level to ensure people have access to food. The only way that veganism will become more accessible, thereby allowing more people to make the change, is if those of us who can become vegan do so and further normalise it and make it more accessible and affordable through simple supply and demand.

“Shouldn’t we try and end all human suffering before worrying about animals?”

Going vegan doesn’t mean we can’t tackle human suffering too, or even that doing so will be slowed down if we tackle animal suffering as well. We don’t have to become campaigners and activists to make a difference — we just need to change how we eat and consume.

“We couldn’t feed everyone on a plant-based diet.”

83 per cent of all farmland is used to produce animal products, yet it only provides us with 37 per cent of the protein consumed globally and 18 per cent of the calories. A global shift to a plant-based diet would mean that we could feed every mouth on the planet and free up 76 per cent of current agricultural land. The real question should be: ‘Can we feed every mouth on the planet if we don’t stop eating animal products?’

Vegan diets don’t contain a natural source of vitamin B12

The B12 that animals we farm get also comes from fortified foods and supplements. It makes zero sense to consume B12 filtered through the body of an animal when we could just take the supplements ourselves.

Vegans are more depressed

Does not eating meat cause mental health issues? Or is your mental health adversely affected by being emotionally invested in the suffering of tens of billions of animals, watching footage of them being abused, while at the same time realising that the vast majority of people in the world are paying for these things to happen to them, including your friends and family?

I don’t know how to cook

Cooking vegan meals is no more complicated or time-consuming than cooking non-vegan meals. In fact, it can often be easier, as you don’t have to worry about food poisoning from raw meat. You can find vegan recipes for more or less every meal that you can think of these days. It is often just as simple as replacing one or two ingredients from the recipe we would normally cook anyway.

Some of my favorite vegan dishes

When you first go vegan, it can be a challenge to build up a reasonable repertoire of dishes to cook. I wish I could provide you with some amazing advice here, but the fact is that most of the time I’m a pretty lazy cook. Many days, I will throw some tofu or tempeh in a pan together with some precut vegetables, add noodles or rice, and call it a meal. I also like to buy a pizza base in the store and throw some vegetables and (vegan) cheese on top. Or I go for a classic AVG (potato-meat-vegetable, the “standard” warm meal in Netherlands and Belgium) with some meat replacement from the store.

When I’m feeling slightly fancier, I like to take a recipe from a website such as The Vegan Atlas or Loving It Vegan or Veggie Society, which all have lots of excellent vegan recipes. Here are a couple recipes that I managed to turn into something pretty edible without too much effort:

Staying healthy as a vegan

There is a lot of scaremongering about the health risks of a full vegan diet. If you read the evidence, most of these risks are greatly overblown and in fact a vegan diet has a lot of health benefits. However, especially when transitioning it can be good to pay attention to a few nutrients. Please keep in mind that I’m not a nutritionist and it is a good idea to get advice from a professional if you have any concerns about this. However, here are the most commonly discussed nutrients in the context of vegan diets:

I personally take supplements for vitamin B12, vitamin D (like many people here in the Netherlands, not just vegans), omega-3, and calcium on a daily basis. When I think about all the benefits that come with a vegan diet, I think this is a very reasonable trade-off.

Further reading and watching

I get that just reading this one blog post will probably not convince you to go vegan all by itself. However, I do encourage you to actually sit down and make a list of the reasons why you would or would not make the transition, and see how they stack up against each other. You could also just try one of the dishes I listed above this week. Finally, if you’re still undecided but would like to read more, below are a few sources that really helped me personally on my journey: